Did it serve no other purpose, this volume should at least offer a rebutment
of the tendency, share by many serious-minded and a few single-minded persons,
contemptuously to credit Oxford with ‘the undergraduate mind.’ We confess ourselves
able neither to comprehend such an abstraction nor to surmise what increment may result
from the fitting of any intellectual caption to so many diverse heads. Our minds are
sparse enough, in all conscience: they must not also be held obnoxious to the charge
of uniformity.

On the other hand, the chaos of values which is the substance of our environment
is not consistent with a standardization of thought, though, on the political analogy,
it may have to be superseded by one. All genuine poetry is in a sense the formation of
private spheres out of a public chaos; and therefore we would remind those who annually
criticize us for lack of homogeneity, first, that on the whole it is environment which
conditions values, not values which form environment; second, that we must hold partly
responsible for our mental sauve-qui-peut, that acedia and unabashed glorification of
the subjective so prominent in the world since the Reformation.

The psychological conflict between self as subject
and self as object, which is patent in the self-consciousness
and emotional stultification resultant from the attempt
to synchronise within the individual mind the synthesis and
the analysis of experience. Such appears to be the prime
development of this century, our experiment in the ‘emergent
evolution of mind. Emotion is no longer necessarily to be analysed
by ‘recollection in tranquillity’; it is to be prehended emotionally and
intellectually at once. And this is of most importance to the poet; for it
is his mind that must bear the brunt of the conflict and may be the first to
realize the new harmony which would imply the success of this synchronization.

The ethical conflict; a struggle to reconcile the notion
of Pure Art, ‘an art completely isolated from everything but
its own laws of operation and the object to be created as such,’[2]
with those exigencies which its conditions of existence as a product
of a human mind and culture must involve, where the one cannot b ignored
nor the other enslaved.

The logical conflict, between the denotatory and
the connotatory sense of words, which is the root-divergence of
classic and romantic; between, that is to say, an asceticism tending
to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism
tending to kill language by dissipating their sense under a multiplicity of associations.

In what degree this problem is realized and met in these pages,
the individual reader must decide. Those who believe that there
is anything valuable in our youth as such we have neither the patienc
e to consider nor the power to condone: our youth should be a period of
spiritual discipline, not a self-justifying dogma. As for the intelligent
reader, we can only remind him, where he experiences distaste, that no
universalized system - political, religious or metaphysical - has been bequeathed
to us; where pleasure, that it is but an infinitesimal progression towards a new
synthesis - one more of those efforts as yet so conspicuous in their paucity.